Ah Louise. This book (The Reader the Text the Poem) was a lot harder to pull together for me. I didn't hear any Hallelulia chorus in the background while I read-- like I did with Literature as Exploration. But, It's all good. Talk about brilliant. I'm a little all over the place so I'll share a couple of noticings.
In her shredding of Hirsch, Rosenblatt helped me clarify my thinking some concerning the fervent quest these days for the scientific. I played around with her wording at the end...but I think it's apt. "The scientist retains and reports only the logical and evidential proof; the prior intuitive process is taken for granted. HIrsch seems to want to do the same thing to a literary work of art -- and in stressing so much the logical processes of validation he has forgotten the essential difference between science and art. In dismissing the creative evocation of the poem as mere imaginative guesswork, Hirsch has thrown out the experienced work of art and retained only the scholarly apparatus" (p. 110).
Some poetic license - with apologies to Dr. R. -- It made me think of how education policy makers have "forgotten the essential difference between science and" what it is to be a person, a social being. And, "in dismissing the the creative evocation" of the person's internal, self-logical, non-linear, and unpredictable inner life, "as mere imaginative guesswork" Dr. No has "thrown out the experienced" life of those who inhabit schools "and retained only" the statistical analyses.
Personal news flash:
I did a conference presentation on Oct. 4 (my first as a doc student) at the Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference held in Marble Falls. The theme this year was Democratizing Education. My paper was The Canon Wars Continue: Resistance, Power and Reading in High School English. The format I chose was roundtable - which was perfect for me as a newbie-to-conferences. When I signed on, I chose the mentoring strand. As a result I met a lovely woman -- English Ed - from Boise State who had some good vibes and advice for me. Jeff Wilhelm, who I quote in the paper, is her colleague. He's written a LOT of books and I think is especially well known for (1997). You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents. He's got another that calling to me to read -- written with Michael Smith (2002). "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: The Role of Literacy in the Lives of Young Men." I digress. The conference is well worth checking out for next year. Apparently, they hold the conference at the same site for 2 years in a row. Next year it's in Atlanta.
http://www.curriculumandpedagogy.org/
More on LMR:
I think that the resistance to reading may well be a sane response to a not-sane situation of being "militated against" (p. 101) as a reader -- enough with erasure, already! She talks on p. 39 about the systematic taking-away of the aesthetic response and replacing it with an efferent one. The illustration she uses is after reading a poem about a cow, the workbook asks "What facts did you learn?" -- eeggad. It's like training kids to see even poetry as a phone book, or encyclopedia -- no wonder they resist. Shades of Lowry's "The Giver", anyone? Of course this is not the case all of the time....but enough of the time to be worrisome. Check out Brian's blog for an in-the-trenches post on this theme (http://rojoag.blogspot.com/).
LMR in that passage was pondering a child's literal response to a fictive story and how it was possible to develop....how it was possible to lose the natural child's inclination to the 'willing suspension of belief' -- it makes an awful kind of sense. It helps me understand the Roadville kids from Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways With Words", a little better too .
Rosenblatt underscores in this book the primacy of that first step -- the actual internal, personal, evocation -- which cannot be skipped or shortchanged...this is the inclusion of the reader in the equation -- the opportunity to "live through" the reading, not vicariously, but as an experience in its own right.
Cheers all. Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts in class.........
2 comments:
You wrote, "It made me think of how education policy makers have "forgotten the essential difference between science and" what it is to be a person, a social being..."
I have been thinking about this a lot. When only quantitative studies are allowed to "count," what is ultimately lost are the people who are being studied and who, ostensibly, all this research is for. I'm not devaluing quantitative, medical model research, but I agree with you that very important stuff gets lost when that's all that is looked at.
The HRC, I know this because my sister cataloged it 20 years ago, has a copy of the NYC phone book that an American DaDa group applied a label to for their Dada magazine and then sent out to their subscribers as that months (?) issue. So is this the opposite of making everything efferent? They made something very efferent, aesthetic.
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